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"I found that producing video lectures spurred me to hone pedagogical presentation to a far higher level than I had in 10 years of teaching the class on campus," he said. The result was an online class that he describes as "significantly more rigorous and demanding than the on-campus version." It takes an immense amount of work to produce an adequate MOOC," The continuing participation of top faculty members in massive online courses, he said, will depend on whether their colleges are willing to let MOOCs distract them from their traditional duties. At that point, Mr. Owens said, campus officials will need to ask themselves whether they want to give that faculty time to online students, "99 percent of whom who are not at their universities."

The purpose of this document is two-fold: - to offer an online history of the development of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) - to use that history to describe major elements of a MOOC

"Most content is finite and contained; whereas, learning is chaotic and indeterminate. It's relatively easy to create technological infrastructures to deliver content, harder to build relationships and learning communities to help mediate, inflect, and disrupt that content. MOOCs, though, don't only have to be about static content. MOOCs are trainable."

There can be no uniform pre-test. There can be no uniform post-test. MOOCs make a loud point about the fact that they don't teach anything in particular. No one is supposed to learn anything in particular. Consequently, there are no broad outcomes to measure. Ergo, it is difficult to say anything about MOOCs from the perspective of whether or not they succeed in facilitating learning, at least under the traditional group "learning gains" paradigm of educational research.

The majority of students in the Udacity and Coursera courses analyzed were professionals in the software industry - hardly the target audience for those seeking a change in how we educate postsecondary students. The current MOOCs provide a nice proof-of-concept, but hardly solve significant educational problems.

improving the quality of instructional design will be key to whether MOOCs eventually find their role within American higher education,

"Princeton, Penn and Michigan will join Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley as partners of Coursera, a company founded earlier this year by the Stanford engineering professors Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng. Using Coursera's platform, the universities will produce free, online versions of their courses that anyone can take."

I did it! I made it all the way through a MOOC, submitting the final assignment in Coursera's Computer Science 101 this afternoon.

"Having done this, I can't teach at Stanford again," he said at a digital conference in Germany in January. "I feel like there's a red pill and a blue pill, and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I've taken the red pill, and I've seen Wonderland."

"Shortly after the invention of the quantum computer chip, and the laying of fibre optic broadband to almost every house in the UK, it had been clear that the days of teaching as a profession were numbered. Teaching had been relegated to a minority profession in a matter of years. It had been simply a question of scale. A teacher, working for 45 years, could teach maybe 1,500 children. Some lessons would be better than others, some children would get more attention and do better than others, they'd occasionally need time off and so on. Simply put, human teachers were inconsistent, and not always great. So when the new educational bodies started recording the best lectures for every subject from around in the world, annotating them in 3D, and enhancing them with CG, what could the schools do to fight back?"

That's neat. Time for professors to update their resumes?

Now, with $16 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the two professors officially launched Coursera, their new online education company that includes partnerships with Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania to offer web-based classes on the Coursera platform for free. A total of 37 undergraduate and graduate-level courses across a broad range of disciplines will launch this spring.

In a few slides, he'd spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. While Thrun admired MIT's OpenCourseWare-the university's decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi, and homework from 2,100 courses-he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual classroom lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is stepping up its investment in innovative delivery models in higher education, announcing $9-million in grants today to support a range of new approaches. Among the awards is the foundation's first contribution to so-called MOOC's, or Massive Open Online Courses, where professors let anyone online take their courses, sometimes attracting tens of thousands of learners. Specifically, the Gates Foundation is giving $1-million to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for its MITx project, which offers such open courses.

For millions of students worldwide, free, open courseware provides a window, if not a front-row seat, to top university classes. The formats are as varied as the people who tune in. Some consist mainly of lectures recorded on iTunes, while other courses seek to replicate a classroom experience by offering study groups, computer-graded tests, and weekly assignments. And while you might get a badge or certificate showing you mastered the material, you generally won't get direct interaction with the professor, who may have recorded the lectures a few years ago. Here is a look at five introductory economics classes: four through open courseware and one in a traditional classroom.

"The Course Builder open source project is an experimental early step for us in the world of online education. It is a snapshot of an approach we found useful and an indication of our future direction. We hope to continue development along these lines, but we wanted to make this limited code base available now, to see what early adopters will do with it, and to explore the future of learning technology."